Fast and Luce

From Vanity Fair editor to the wife of Mr. Time-Life himself, Clare Boothe Luce was the original power-tripper. She understudied Mary Pickford, wrote The Women in three days, became a congresswoman and then ambassador to Italy. But she was never one of the girls, and she never considered herself happy. When she died last year, Time called her the “Renaissance woman of the century.” Was she? Marie Brenner profiles a strange and complicated lady.

On one of the last nights that Clare Boothe Luce went out in her life, her friend Marvin Liebman took her to a fine Chinese restaurant in her beloved Washington. Mrs. Luce ordered velvet chicken, which she said reminded her of the hundreds of meals she had shared with the “Gimo,” as Time, one of her late husband’s many magazines, had so often styled its pet crusader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The “Gimo” was now long dead, and Clare Luce was eighty-four years old, weeks away from death, yet her appearance was remarkable. Her skin remained translucent as a pearl, her eyes, despite her near blindness, the cold blue of an aquamarine. She was dressed exquisitely in pastel silks. Though she could hardly walk and her legendary Great Lady brittleness and acuity—fodder for the four biographies already written about her—had been eroded by cancer and loneliness, that night she was “on,” talking constantly, telling stories of SALT and NATO, Burma and London, Joe McCarthy and Ike, the “Gimo” and his wife, the “Missimo,” with herself at the very center of each anecdote, dazzling for ever and absolutely a young man from the Federal Trade Commission whom Liebman had invited along to meet the legend before it was too late.

The stories were not new, and part of her mystique was her tireless and ruthless ability to perform them, no interruptions permitted. Her friends speculated that her incessant talking was a form of self-protection: See how smart I am. In public, she was indisputably actressy, a woman of theater, calling everyone “darling”; her voice was pure Bette Davis, husky and tough, with a few Connecticut-lady trills thrown in for effect: “tomahtoes,” “my deah gahdener.” But somewhere in the middle of dinner, she seemed to tire of talking of “darling Douglas—MacArthur, you know” and “Franklin and that dreadful Eleanor,” and her voice lost the toughness which had always marked her social persona. She retreated into the realm of the private Clare, a woman of considerable vulnerability, alone at the end of her life without a web of friends to buoy her spirit, without children, without her husband to enhance her Washington status. She was an angry woman with a brain tumor, powerless and near death, contemplating the end. “You know, I have had a terrible life,” she finally said. “I married two men I really didn’t like. My only daughter was killed in a car accident. My brother committed suicide. Has my life been a life for anyone to envy?”

Clare Boothe Luce invented herself completely and absolutely, as all Great Ladies who start with nothing but brains, ambition, and the required sublime looks inevitably do. Mrs. Luce, however, did it better and longer than her peers—if she had any—and created an image based on glamour, brains, flint, and the ability to make people believe that every word she said was true.

“You know,” she would tell friends, “once I was at the White House with Franklin—Roosevelt, you know—and he said to me, ‘Clare, if only I could think of a way to try to explain to our great country what I am doing, if only I could think of some phrase which would sum it all up!’ I said to Franklin, ‘My dear Mr. President, what about using the term “a new deal”?’ ” This anecdote had endless variations: “I was in London during the blitz with dear Winston—Churchill, you know—and the bombs started falling, and Winston and I were at the Savoy. Winston said, ‘The British people have such guts, Clare—if only I could think of a way to describe their struggle,’ and I said, ‘How about “blood, sweat, and tears”?’”

She would also tell friends that Jock Whitney, David Rockefeller, Averell Harriman, and George Bernard Shaw had wanted to marry her, and that Strom Thurmond had goosed her—all untrue. Once, when People magazine, part of her late husband’s Time-Life empire, was doing a profile of her, a researcher called Clare’s friend Shirley Clurman in a panic. “Mrs. Clurman,” the researcher said, “not one word that Mrs. Luce has told our reporter checks out!”

There was hardly need for her to make anything up. By the time she was thirty-four years old, she had been an understudy for Mary Pickford; a suffragette flying gliders for her patron, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont; a socialite married to a rich Newport dipsomaniac named George Brokaw, by whom she had one daughter; a divorcée with a ton of alimony at the beginning of the Depression; and, as Clare Boothe Brokaw, the cheeky managing editor of Vanity Fair. “I don’t think my position unusual for a woman. I’m following a perfectly natural urge to do what I like,” she disingenuously told a World-Telegram reporter in 1933, when she was thirty. She was rumored to have had affairs with Buckminster Fuller and Bernard Baruch, and had written a best-selling collection of satirical essays called Stuffed Shirts. After marrying Henry Luce, the publishing tycoon, in 1935, she wrote plays, including one Broadway classic, served as a correspondent during World War II, became a Republican congress woman, and in 1953 was the first woman to be made American ambassador to a major country. It was only at the end of her life, when she was stuck in an apartment at the Watergate and seemed hardly at peace, that some of her friends began to wonder if, for all her ambition and power, it might have occurred to Clare that she had got things slightly wrong.

When she died last October, *Time,*her late husband’s most influential magazine, called her “the pre-eminent Renaissance woman of the century.” There were memorial services in New York and Washington, attended by friends and associates that included Richard Nixon, Patrick Buchanan, former secretary of state William Rogers, Vernon Walters, and William Buckley, whom she had cajoled to prevail upon Cardinal O’Connor to allow her service to be held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

If, in her long and eventful life, Mrs. Luce had her share of detractors, and she did, even the most vehement of them, such as Helen Lawrenson and Dorothy Parker, always believed that their bête noire got everything she ever wanted.

‘Things happened to her that didn’t happen to other people,” a priest who was close to Clare Luce late in life said. But when she talked of her earliest years, she could never seem to recall the facts the same way twice. Her father was like a character in a dream. In her biographies, he is described variously as a fiddler, a Memphis Coca-Cola bottler, the proprietor of the Boothe Piano Company—sometimes the time frame is so distorted that he appears to have had all these professions simultaneously. There is no debate on one overwhelming fact: William Booth, a descendant of John Wilkes Booth, abandoned Clare and her brother in their early childhood. (The e was added to Booth—again sources differ—either by Clare’s grandfather, to distance his family from Lincoln’s assassin, or by Clare herself, for effect.) Clare’s mother, a woman of such beauty that her daughter was said to pale by comparison, was left to fend for herself, and the Booth family, without Mr. Booth, wound up in a boardinghouse. Anyway, that is what Clare Luce would tell interviewers. “Mother always cooked fried eggs by opening the gas jet over the radiator and keeping the window open so the landlord wouldn’t smell her cooking and throw us out,” she said. Mrs. Booth’s maternal efforts were focused completely on young Clare, perhaps because she realized that a blonde, curly-headed daughter could be peddled more successfully than a son. One probable reason why Clare as an adult rarely entertained any doubt about her self-worth was that she had had such unreserved mother love as a child. Much of Clare’s childhood frustration centered on her search for her father, and she later told friends that she once met him in a subway long after her mother had assured her he was dead. Although he had abandoned the family for a common showgirl, Clare’s mother informed her dramatically that he had left them for Mary Garden, a famous opera star of the era. “Keeping up the bella figura ran in Clare’s family,” a friend said.

By age ten, Clare was making the rounds at the Biograph studio, trying to fulfill her mother’s ambitions for her to be the new Mary Pickford. In one movie, she actually understudied Pickford. Mrs. Booth made every effort to shield her from other children, thereby nurturing the complete self-absorption that she would always be noted for. “When I was a child, I was so lonely I became a compulsive eater,” Clare said. “My mother’s tendency, because of the boardinghouse, was to cook very little and to buy everything at the bakery.” Although Clare would lose her baby fat, she never lost her primal devotion to sweets, and as a rich, autocratic old lady running a great household, she used to insist that her houseguests conform to her lunch menu: naked lettuce leaves followed by a great wedge of apple pie or chocolate cake.

When Clare was still small, Mrs. Booth had the luck to take up with a married Jewish tire merchant named Joseph Jacobs, who advised her to gamble every penny she had from her divorce settlement on a single stock. She did, and made enough to take Clare out of the boardinghouse and off to the small hotels of Paris, where she could give her “culture” and a patina of the education she lacked. Clare perfected her French while her brother was parked in an American military school. Several years later, Clare was returning from another sojourn abroad when luck struck again, in the form of the daffy suffragette-socialite Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont. Clare and Mrs. Belmont struck up an acquaintance, and Mrs. Belmont was so impressed with her that she confided to Elsa Maxwell, according to Maxwell’s autobiography, “I met a girl on the boat who has all the earmarks of talent and success. She’s only seventeen and she’s poor, but she has beauty and brains to go as far as her ambition will take her. . . . I’m going to give her a push in the right direction.”

Eventually Clare would marry Mrs. Belmont’s candidate for her, George Brokaw, the Newport millionaire alcoholic, who at age forty-three had never attempted matrimony and whose mother, upon meeting Clare, no doubt begged her to marry him. She was all of nineteen. Their daughter, Ann, was born almost immediately, but Clare was hardly maternal. “Rich women are not too put upon by their children,” she later said. “You don’t have to do all the things for a child that those women who had to stay at home did. My Ann had a French governess who took care of her until she was twelve years old and went off to boarding school.” Brokaw’s Newport world, which Clare would spike in Stuffed Shirts, always shunned Clare as a penniless social climber, but as Mrs. Brokaw she was nevertheless able to move into a limestone-and-marble mansion on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. The union, however, was doomed. Years later, she would tell the writer Dominick Dunne, whom she met at a luncheon in Newport, “I know all about violence and physical abuse because my first husband used to beat me severely when he got drunk. Once, I can remember coming home from a party and walking up our vast marble staircase at the Fifth Avenue house while he was striking me. I thought, If I just gave him one shove down the staircase I would be rid of him forever.” Instead, she paid a call on old Mrs. Brokaw and begged her to permit a divorce. Mrs. Brokaw did, and in 1929 Clare found herself with a settlement of $425,000 plus $30,000 a year for living expenses and her five-year-old daughter, whom she had been forced, in an unusually ugly custody battle, to give up to her former husband for six months each year.

Imagine Clare Boothe Brokaw that autumn of 1929. She was twenty-six years old, released from the confines of a vile Newport marriage, a nervy glamour girl who claimed that Cecil Beaton had pronounced her “drenchingly lovely.” (Beaton had made the remark about someone else, according to Helen Lawrenson, and Clare “just pinched it.”) She was breathtaking, however; she had had her nose fixed, and had lightened her hair since her Newport days, and although her clothes were often too fussy and her figure was imperfect, she radiated an aura of fragility which camouflaged her brazen intentions and seemed to reduce every man she ever met to a stuttering fool. “That poor little kid,” Bernard Baruch used to call her.

As the stock market crashed, Clare moved to a large apartment on East Fifty-second Street and hired for her painter the father of fifteen-year-old Leo Lerman of Brooklyn, who is now editorial adviser of Condé Nast Publications. “My father was determined to show me what a magnificent New York apartment was,” he recalled, “and I can remember driving up on Fifty-second Street in my father’s truck and seeing this exquisite blonde standing on the corner with her dog. I think she was wearing the first Chanel suit I ever saw. It was black with a saw-toothed hem, and with it she had on the most beautiful blouse. When I was introduced to her, however, she was surprisingly cold, almost charmless. I can remember thinking that she had no interest in children at all. There was no sign of her daughter in the apartment.”

At this stage Clare Boothe Brokaw clearly placed immense value on being known for her style. Her dining room, which overlooked the city, Lerman remembered, “was covered with silver tea paper painted over with a panorama of the New York skyline in Matisse colors.” The table, which seated twenty, was smoky mirror glass, reflecting the mural of New York and Clare’s own skyscraper ambitions. Her living room was also very much à la mode, a study in Chinese red, black, and white. It was the era when publisher Condé Nast and editor Frank Crowninshield, with his cane and endless charm, presided over New York, defining who was elegant and who was not through the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Great Ladies of the era were immaculate, impeccable, able to make smart chat at smart clubs. Janet Rhinelander Stewart and Mona Williams were considered the arbiters of style, but Clare probably modeled herself more on the irrepressible Alice Roosevelt Long worth, whose feistiness she certainly must have admired. Clare had the money and nerve to prop up her ambitions; she met Condé Nast at a party and demanded a job. When he said no, she showed up anyway—she just sat down at a desk at Vogue and wrote captions until he relented.

She was quickly moved to Vanity Fair, a man’s world editorially and more her style than the frivolous world of Vogue in 1930. In those days Vanity Fair was quartered in three semi-partitioned rooms between the elevators and the airy, scented suites of Vogue. Clare started off writing captions for the Hall of Fame. One of her first was about Henry Luce, the founder of Time, whom she had loathed on first sight. “He claims that he has no other interest outside of his work, and that his work fills his waking hours,” she wrote. Soon she was promoted to writing short, tart pieces, and with a facility that never left her she wrote dozens of essays about the world of privilege and pretense: “Hollywood Is Not So Bad,” “Portrait of a Fashionable Painter,” “Life Among the Snobs,” “The Great Garbo,” “Talking Up—and Thinking Down,” this last a social climber’s guide to making sparkling conversation. “The cardinal rule to be remembered is that all contemporary conversation must be limned or suggested against a sparkling background of sex . . . the multitudinous shades of which can be a polite pink at the lobster course to a passionate purple at the grapes,” she advised. Wilfrid Sheed, in his biography of Clare Luce, observed that her pieces were remarkable because they depended “entirely on flourishes of wit and style,” as if the essayist were winging it “on virtuosity and press clippings: not a report but a performance.”

The Vanity Fair of that era was an aesthetic and intellectual paradise, ruled over by Crowninshield, whom everyone called “Crowny,” and his managing editor, Donald Freeman (Clare was rumored to have been involved with him too). The magazine was required reading for the smart set, and the best writers and photographers, as well as the nobs they chronicled, would wander in and out of the office all day. Hey wood Broun, John O’Hara (another rumored lover), Robert Sherwood, George Jean Nathan, Edward Steichen, George Arliss (who often arrived carrying a snake), Dorothy Parker, Walter Lippmann, and Elsa Maxwell showed up frequently. It became part of Clare’s legend that each morning before she appeared she would already have been attended to by a hairdresser and manicurist, and, according to her former copy editor, Jeanne Ballot Winham, she “would be wearing a perfect little suit with lots of frills at the collar and cuffs.” Despite Clare’s blond fragility, she was, Winham recalled, “a female who had male ideas.” Helen Lawrenson, who as Helen Brown Norden worked at Vanity Fair then as well as later, once wrote of Clare’s ability to social climb: she would call a star such as Constance Bennett to invite her to a dinner for Maurice Chevalier and then ask Chevalier for Connie Bennett. If Clare invented that well-worn trick, she was rewarded with a constant parade of celebrities, who attended her parties and marveled at her style. On her office desk was a sign that read, “Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, / He travels the fastest who travels alone.” When Donald Freeman was killed in a car accident in 1932, it was Clare Boothe Brokaw, not “Brownie,” as she called the future Helen Lawrenson, who was made the new managing editor of Vanity Fair.

Each morning, Jeanne Winham remembered, “Clare would sit in her office poring over hundreds of news photos that had been taken the day before, analyzing what we should cover.” One of her most popular features was “Ike and Mike—They Look Alike,” the clever pairing of photos in which mismatched people resembled each other, and perhaps the inspiration for Spy magazine’s “Separated at Birth.” As managing editor, Clare Brokaw determined who was renowned and accomplished enough for the magazine’s Hall of Fame or outré enough for the opposite distinction: “We Nominate for Oblivion.” (After Clare left Vanity Fair, she made the 1934 Hall of Fame herself, along with Shirley Temple and Robert Moses.) Even as she helped introduce the newest French painters to America, she realized the obvious—that with a depression raging, Vanity Fair had better forget the froth and turn to politics if it wanted to stay afloat. Once, Condé Nast proposed a satirical cover on “the Forgotten Man.” Clare gave her boss a cold stare, according to one of her biographers, and said, “I don’t see anything even remotely funny about people being hungry.” (Helen Lawrenson later took credit for this remark.) She enjoyed taking jabs at world leaders, and she mercilessly attacked the Roosevelts. F.D.R., for his part, loathed her, and much later at the White House said to an aide within her earshot, “Will you get that woman out of here.” Bernard Baruch took her with him to the Democratic convention of 1932. (“Mr. Baruch, I would like you to teach me all about business policy,” she had said coyly to the elder statesman when she first met him through Condé Nast, and he was charmed for life.) The reporter Arthur Krock called her “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” but despite her money and fame Clare had her insecurities. “The Algonquin crowd was too much for me,” she once said. “I couldn’t compete with them.” Instead, Clare presided at the weekly Vanity Fair lunches in the Graybar Building, where eggs Benedict were catered by the Savarin Restaurant downstairs.

It became clear during the Vanity Fair days that Clare Luce had made a grave miscalculation in her quest to go the distance as a Great Lady: she dismissed most women and relied on men for her ascent. Women quickly learned not to trust her, and she failed to foresee that at the end of every Great Lady’s life, when the powerful husbands are dead, the looks are gone, and sex is but a memory, it is the companionship and goodwill of other women that she needs. Empathy, compassion, and generosity are the strong suits of female friendship, and Clare was not known for an abundance of any of these qualities.

A well-known Helen Lawrenson story had Clare inviting the women at Vanity Fair to one of her parties. “Just wear what you have on at the office,” she said, and then greeted them at the door wearing a dazzling gown of gold lamé. What is less well known is that Lawrenson published that anecdote in Esquire in a famous hatchet job on her former friend just months after Clare had given her $3,000 because she was down-and-out. Clare did have close friends, such as Colleen Moore, the actress, and the socialite Buffy Cobb, although Buffy and Clare once had a falling-out over a man and were not on good terms for ten years.

Clare, of course, was capable of kindnesses: she invited Wilfrid Sheed, at age eighteen, to spend the summer at her home in Connecticut. “Watch out for envy,” she advised him. “I don’t see why anyone would envy a guy with polio,” he told her. “Yes, I guess that might slow them down some. But they’ll find a way,” she said. Often impulsively, she would paint pictures for friends or take them on trips. But female friends to go the distance with eluded Clare, perhaps because few women wanted to be subjected for hours to hearing Clare on the necessity of the China lobby or on her perceptions of U Thant. Yet on first meeting, the uninitiated were always stunned by the quality of her mind.

Clare was known for her sense of humor, and her humor was very Broadway, a bit weary and angry, not fast and bright like Dorothy Parker’s. Clare’s style was cynical: “No good turn goes unpunished”; “Home is where you hang your architect”; “I can’t avoid writing. It’s a sort of nervous tic I have developed since I gave up needlepoint.” When Clare was young, she loved playing good-natured and girlish practical jokes. Once, in the early 1930s, when she was traveling through Europe with a friend from Vanity Fair, a concierge switched her passport with that of a man who was incredibly handsome and well traveled, as Clare discovered when she studied his passport. Unbelievably, the next day Clare found herself sitting next to this suave stranger on a train. “Let me read your palm,” she said, fixing him with her cerulean gaze. “You have been in Morocco, Russia, and Ceylon. You were born in June of 1905 . . . ” The stranger was mesmerized, and Clare never confessed it was a gag. “This led to the most wonderful affair,” she confided to a friend years later. At times her plays could have an equal note of farce. In Kiss the Boys Goodbye, a radical columnist remarks to a maid, “I’ll bet the pool’s full of scum.” The maid replies, “Nawsuh, comrade, you ain’t been in yet.”

In 1935 Clare captivated Henry Luce, who influenced about 40 million readers and viewers—one-third of America—with his Lucepress, consisting of Time, Fortune, and the March of Time newsreels, which interpreted the week’s events for moviegoers all over the globe. She snagged Luce with facility and speed, causing him to leave his lovely wife. Lila, after merely being introduced to him on three public occasions. The last of these was a ball Elsa Maxwell gave for Cole Porter, where Luce took Clare from her escort while his wife was dancing, and walked her through the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria to announce without sentiment or fanfare, and much to her astonishment, that he would marry her as soon as he could obtain a divorce.

She did not say no. Certainly, an often observed maxim about Clare was how much she wanted power. She loved men with “big heads,” she used to say, “the Gary Cooper type.” She was as gorgeous as a courtesan, but her appeal was more “a head thing than a body thing,” as one of her friends said. She now finally had her dream man, and somewhere in the relentless and self-made Harry Luce she must also have seen her secret self. “A woman’s best protection is—the right man,” a character observes in The Women, which Clare wrote the year after she married Harry.

She wrote the first draft in three days, while perched in bed with a blue bow in her hair, waited on by her four maids. Tactlessly, she announced that fact to the world, thereby alienating all those writers who were not quite as facile and certainly not as rich at the height of the Depression. But The Women ran more than six hundred performances, and by 1941 had played in twenty-five countries and ten languages, and made the author $200,000. Her women were “dirty little trollops,” “double-crossing little squirts,” or “Park Avenue pushovers,” and her odd attitude toward her sex permeated this, the most famous of her six plays: “She doesn’t want to be a woman . . . ” “Who does?” “Oh, Mother, what fun is there to be a lady?” “One more piece of motherly advice: Don’t confide in your girl friends!” Her bevy of females spoke their minds, and in all of them there was a bit of Clare—in Crystal, the trashy opportunist; in Mary, the longsuffering wife who opines to her daughter, “These days, darling, ladies do all the things men do. They fly aeroplanes across the ocean, they go into politics and business.” But perhaps Clare’s vulnerabilities were most visible in her martyred Edith, who says, “If a woman’s got any instincts, she feels when her husband’s off the reservation.”

“Harry did not like show business people,” Clare Luce once confided to her biographer Wilfrid Sheed as a means of explaining why she stopped writing for the theater, which had been her true passion. Harry Luce didn’t think much of liberal Democrats either. “You couldn’t be married to Harry and not be a Republican,” Clare told Sheed. And so Clare became a war correspondent—the “Body by Fisher of the campaign,” the columnist Dorothy Thompson sneered—an ardent conservative, a Republican congress woman from Connecticut, a speaker at Republican conventions, and finally the ambassador to Italy, a stint that was notable for her belief that she was being poisoned by paint at the official residence.

As Mrs. Luce, Clare was protected from ever worrying about money or status again. She presided over an immense aerie in Manhattan; Sugar Hill, her twenty-one-room mansion in Ridgefield, Connecticut; and a vast plantation in South Carolina called Mepkin, with thirty black servants who, when Clare was in residence, would float thousands of freshly cut azaleas on the muddy river that fed the Mepkin rice paddies. “Clare did not like to walk in her gardens and see silty water,” a friend said. Cabinet officers and prime ministers found their way to her table. Politicians, military men, and movie stars perpetually courted the Luces, hoping to be rewarded with the cover of Time. With all this splendor, the Luce houses were astonishing for their utter conventionality: lots of glass (even a Steuben collection), pastels, and such coldness, a friend remarked, that it seemed as if the Luces were so consumed with their need for power that cozy domesticity could play no part in their lives. “Gentiles don’t re-cover,” she once remarked to the producer Allan Carr when he noticed the stuffing coming out of one of her chairs. And yet, in her Connecticut house every towel, sheet, and pillowcase was emblazoned with her monogram, CBL, as if new money were running amok in the mansion. Even so, she was a mediocre and often reluctant hostess, sometimes taking to her bed if she didn’t feel like entertaining, although in one amazing breach of taste the dignitary she neglected in this way was Greece’s Princess Sophia. Clare was given to black moods, when she would vanish into her bedroom for days on end, terrifying her houseguests and especially her stepson. Hank Luce. The mood swings could have been a performance, and her lack of graciousness a sign that Clare ultimately felt she no longer had to try so hard—she could now afford to be cavalier. “They”— the supplicants and the climbers—needed her and her husband’s magazines more than she needed them. And for a long time that was true.

In the beginning they were a supreme couple. Harry was “star-struck,” according to a longtime friend, and he loved “displaying Clare.” For her part, Clare was dazzled by Harry, whose originality of thought matched her own. Here at last was not a society drunk but a man of stature. Harry Luce was a journalistic genius who believed so much in his own thoughts that he would publish a four-hundred-page book called The Ideas of Henry Luce. Even better, Harry had the power and the money to protect Clare from her frequent critics. A famous story has Harry querying a lingerie bill for $7,000 and Clare responding, “Well, Harry, are we wealthy or aren’t we?” Even if Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin wits and most theater critics sniped at Clare, as the wife of Time-Life she could be impervious. With Harry behind her, Clare could continue her childhood pattern of never entertaining a moment of selfdoubt. Often she and Harry would stay up until dawn, their heads locked together, talking incessantly about world events. They were an intellectual match; both revered power but lacked time for anyone who wasn’t useful. “Clare would be nice to her inferiors if she could find any,” Dorothy Parker once cracked. But Clare had gone beyond “Dottie” to become Harry’s “idea person,” a friend said. Perhaps to flatter her husband, Clare often spoke in Timespeak, saying things like “No nitwit he.” Harry’s nickname for Clare was Mike. The Luces traveled constantly, and they would play complicated word games for hours. (Q: I know Mr. and Mrs. Pen and their son, a flower. A: John Quill.) Above all, Harry was powerful and serious enough to be a father figure for Clare, and in the early photographs of the Luces, she is radiant.

It is fashionable to say about Clare Luce that she was a liar, but she was really more of a fabulist, who happened to be married to a brilliant propagandist. Like her husband, the son of a Presbyterian missionary based in China, she believed that she understood the notion of truth from the creation, and her obligation, like his, was to advance that truth. Clare was not the kind of woman who was going to criticize her husband for his penchant for twisting journalism to serve his political views. “The weekly fiction magazine,” other reporters would call Luce’s Time—in private, of course. “Time today is the gratuitous sneer and the open mouth of shocked belief . . . the clasped hands of Presbyterian piety,” a pre-Murdoch New York Post once declared. Harry told Clare, according to one of his biographers, that he could fancy no one who was his superior intellectually. “What about Einstein and John Kieran?” Clare responded archly. (Kieran was a famous sportswriter and the star of the popular radio program Information, Please.) Certainly, like Harry, she was convinced that her version of history was definitive. And she was not shy about discussing her role in world affairs. Her war reportage was equally solipsistic: “I had a talk with handsome, blueeyed, crisp-moustached General Alexander”; “Madame Chiang read me a bitter article that she had written”; “I ate dinner with the Gissimo, Hollington Tong, and Madame.”

Sex went out of the Luce marriage very quickly, according to Clare’s friends. Harry wanted a wife who would stay at home, and he had chosen Clare. Just before they married, according to Henry Luce’s biographer W. A. Swanberg, Daniel Longwell, a Time executive, went to see Clare in Salzburg and took it upon himself to say that the best thing she could do would be to settle down and have lots of babies and stay out of the magazines. Clare reportedly burst into tears and said she couldn’t have any more children. Despite the editor’s warning, Clare for years tried to influence the magazines, but Luce’s top men always fought her, and Luce would not override them. For her part, Clare was extraordinarily condescending to the Time-Life staff, whom she called “Harry’s little people.” She always took credit for thinking up Life.

Later, Clare was even more competitive with Harry, and he didn’t like to be beaten. Everything was a challenge to her; she loved jigsaw puzzles and word games and trained herself to be a superb shot and horsewoman. She often entertained guests by performing an Olympic-quality swan dive off her high board—she was still diving at seventy—and she prided herself on mastering everything she took up, including needlepoint. She would rarely defer to Harry, and at dinners she would regale one end of the table while he held forth at the other, reportedly glaring viciously at her every so often. “Clare and Harry were like circles that intersected but did not overlap,” Hank Luce explained. “Clare did not care a hoot about China, she didn’t understand Presbyterianism, she was ignorant of all the charities and institutions that my father supported.”

Clare Luce was of course far wittier and better company than her husband, which was not exactly guaranteed to do much for his competitive ego or their pleasure in bed. “Harry is serially impotent,” Clare once told a friend, by which she meant that he could not conduct affairs with other women and keep up a sexual pretense with her at the same time. However Presbyterian Harry was, he had his share of worldly desires. At one point he almost left Clare for Lady Jeanne Campbell, Lord Beaverbrook’s daughter, and Clare remarked, “If Harry marries Jeannie and I marry Beaverbrook, then I will be my husband’s grandmother.” Lady Jeanne married Norman Mailer instead. There was at times a feeling among those who knew Clare well that she was relieved to have the sexual pressure lifted, but she once confided to Wilfrid Sheed that this was absolutely not the case. She was tremendously bothered by the lack of intimacy in her marriage, and, worse than that, her female vanity was hurt. “I could tell you an incident that would prove this,” Sheed told me, “but I would not betray the confidence. I believe it should die with her.” When Clare decided to run for Congress in 1942, Harry was delighted. “I am convinced that Harry just wants me out of the house,” she told friends.

Of course, she was aided immensely in her quest for glory by the hype she received from her husband’s magazines, a hype that reached such astonishing proportions that when she left for Europe to cover the war for Life, Dorothy Parker referred to her dispatches as “All Clare on the Western Front.”

‘Did you manage to see your daughter, Ann, as much as you wanted to?” a friend once asked Clare Luce in a taped interview that has never been released. There was a pause as Clare, then an old woman, readied her answer. “No,” she said. “When I started to do war reporting and run for Congress, with Ann’s vacations from boarding school and college, things didn’t always fit together properly.” Mrs. Luce, speaking thirty years after the fact, sounded remarkably dispassionate, but perhaps that too was part of the theatrical persona she had developed to camouflage her emotions about the central tragedy of her life.

It happened in January of 1944. Clare, Ann, and Harry had spent the month of December, as always, at Mepkin, their South Carolina plantation. Mepkin meant family to Clare; it was the first real dirt she had ever owned as a Great Lady, and a symbol that she was now a woman of property. Her friend Bernard Baruch, who owned Hobcaw Barony, the plantation just down the road, had told her about Mepkin’s availability, and when Clare saw the immense acreage in the South Carolina low country for the first time, she said to Harry, “This is the most beautiful property I have ever seen in my life.” And so, in 1936, Harry bought the seven-thousand-acre plantation for his bride. It was truly magnificent: sunlight dappled the live-oak trees with their veils of Spanish moss, and the soft South Carolina air gave the place a haunting beauty, which Clare always spoke of as “melancholy.” Harry and Clare stocked their plantation with quail and other game for their frequent shooting parties and hired the architect Edward Durell Stone to design several modern brick-and-glass houses, which she named Strawberry, Tartleberry, Washington, and Claremont. She used the acquisition of Mepkin as an opportunity for more press, by writing about her new passion for the South in Vogue: “Let me say that I am one of Dixie’s latest enthusiastic converts. . . . Ah, shades of the Ravenels and Lees and Carters, I blush. . . . I can only plead this extenuating circumstance: we bought [Mepkin] from a Northerner who got it from another Northerner and none of us got it terribly cheap.” Later she wrote, “I wasn’t going to build a vast plantation house, because that would have been fraudulent. After all, I was a newcomer.” In the 1930s there were no decent roads to get to Mepkin, which was deep in rural South Carolina— Ku Klux Klan country. Every year the Luces would take the long train ride from New York to Charleston, where a boat would take them up the Carolina coast and onto the Cooper River, which flowed past their property. Ann adored Mepkin, so for Clare the month of December, when Ann was home from boarding school and later Stanford University, was a cherished and special family time.

It had been especially so that Christmas of 1943, while the war was raging. Ann was then a senior at Stanford, and Clare had long since published her book Europe in the Spring, in which she warned America of the danger of Hitler. As Ann had got older, she had grown closer to her mother and, as Hank Luce, her stepbrother, remembered, “just as opinionated.” She was tall and sharp-featured, not as pretty as Clare but attractive and very smart, and Harry Luce adored her. He frequently wrote her letters when she was still at Foxcroft, which she would answer by telling him how she had defended the family honor when her snobby classmates made awful remarks about Time. Clare often felt guilty about her absences from Ann. When she left for Europe as a reporter in 1940, she sent her daughter a long, falsely cheerful, and guilt-ridden letter about leaving her yet again. The letter says much about their relationship, which has been portrayed, perhaps unfairly, as consistently distant. Clare loved her daughter, but she was already a famous magazine editor without a husband when her child was growing up, and then she was Mrs. Luce, a social eminence, a hit play-wright, and a celebrity journalist in an era when rich women routinely parked their children with governesses and in fancy schools.

Annie my darling—You were a grand little trouper about my going and I really loved you better at that moment, for the swell way you took it, more than I ever did perhaps before! . . . Hdya like the new clothes? Do you look adoreable in that little frilled bathing suit? . . . Is the green tea gown with the frills flattering or isn’t it? Please send me lots of news in your first letter. . . . You’d think perhaps that I’d be the one with the news, seeing as how I’m travelling to Europe on a big boat. . . . I send you millions, BUT millions of kisses my sweetheart. Your Mother.

Just after New Year’s of 1944, Ann Brokaw left Mepkin with her mother. Ann was on her way west to go back to Stanford; Clare was heading for Los Angeles to give a speech. The trip was special for both of them. They would have two weeks of traveling and seeing friends together before Ann was due back at school. “We had such a beautiful time together on that trip,” Clare recalled in the last years of her life. “We took a train, and Annie took the upper berth and I took the lower berth, and I can still see her funny little face sticking out. She said to me, ‘Mother, I know the strangest thing. I know all of a sudden that I will never be married.’ And I said to her, ‘What a funny idea! You’re beautiful—of course you’ll be married. Don’t you want to be?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I do. Of course. But I never will be.’

“When we got to San Francisco, it was decided that I would drive her down to Stanford very early. The night before, she came into my room at the Mark Hopkins and said, ‘Mother, you don’t have to drive me down early, because a friend will take me in her car, and you can come down later for lunch.’ ”

And so Clare Boothe Luce slept late, a decision she no doubt regretted bitterly for the rest of her life. “That morning a terrible woman who had been traveling with us as a secretary for me came into my bedroom and began to shake me. ‘Wake up! Wake up! Your daughter’s been killed. Ann is dead!’ She screamed at me that Ann and her friend had been hit by a man who had gone through a light and sideswiped the convertible. She was shaking me by the shoulders, saying Ann had been thrown from the open car and hit a tree and broken her neck. It was so strange. . . . I called up Harry. I remember the first words he said: ‘Not that beautiful girl. Not that beautiful girl. I’ll be right out to take care of everything.’ I had to get away from that terrible secretary who brought me the bad news. . . . I called a friend of mine who was one of the officers I had met in that slit trench in Burma and I said, ‘I need you terribly badly. . . . ’ We just walked and walked through San Francisco. . . . I couldn’t cry, for some odd reason. And when Harry got there, we took Ann back to Mepkin, because we had all had such marvelous times together there. . . . I buried her in the churchyard on the next plantation.”

Ann’s death changed Clare Boothe Luce’s life irrevocably. She blamed herself completely for neglecting her only child, for missing the small moments, and the large ones, of a girl’s life that elude a mother building a stellar career. She began to tell friends that everything she had done as a young woman on the make had been a “complete waste”; her years of brittle cleverness mortified her now. She no doubt believed she was being punished for her precocity with the loss of her child. For months, Harry Luce could not pull her out of her depression. Then, slowly, she emerged from her profound grief and sadness into the predictable next stage of reacting to the loss of Ann: she became filled with rage. “What kind of God would take my child?” she asked a priest. Consumed with anger, Clare at first tried to lose herself in the secular world. Some months after Ann’s death, she entered the most vicious congressional race of her career, lashing out at the ailing Franklin Roosevelt, who was running for a fourth term, as she might have wished to lash out against the fates that had taken her daughter away from her. She announced to the world, as she barnstormed through Connecticut, that Roosevelt was so ill that it was doubtful if he could survive four more years. Even worse, Harry Luce had just acquired a large percentage of the NBC Blue radio network, and Clare used this new acquisition as a forum for her attacks. It was often difficult to feel sympathetic with her, because her anger seemingly knew no bounds. At the 1944 Republican convention, she excoriated F.D.R. by practically accusing him of murdering “G.I. Joe and G.I. Jim,” her term for the dead American soldiers that she said Roosevelt had promised never to send overseas. Coming, as her speech did, just as Hitler’s death camps were being liberated—and after she and Harry Luce had lobbied for years for America’s intervention in Europe—her speech was considered a shocking aberration from a political sharpie. The New Yorker commented that the speech “made it difficult to keep anything on our stomach for twenty-four hours.” However grief-stricken and beautiful Clare Luce was, she was sternly and rightly criticized for this smear. Even the Bridgeport Post, which had always supported her, said that “at times she is positively cruel.”

She was spread too thin to write. Shredding F.D.R. and Eleanor on any dais that she could obtain took up the time she might better have spent at her typewriter. Like her husband, she was a shrill ideologue. When she campaigned for Congress in 1944, Dorothy Parker, Clifton Fadiman, and Tallulah Bank-head showed up to speak out against her—a fact which may have inadvertently ensured her victory.

It is difficult to know exactly when Clare began to turn away from the secular world and toward the comforts of the church. At the end of the war she was in Europe, and perhaps what she saw on that gruesome voyage eroded her personal rage and caused her to seek a spiritual cure. Soon after Buchenwald was liberated, she asked an American general to take her in, and no human being who saw the bodies stacked up there like firewood in 1945 ever got over it. To survive a world gone crazy, Clare, like many others after the war, reached out to a religion that was pure and uncut by modernity. Harry’s Presbyterianism was not sufficient for her; she would need the centuries-old ritual, the imperial purple, the incense, and the fine intellectual ballast of Thomas Aquinas and the church fathers. When she came home to America, she began to take instruction from a friend of hers, a simple Polish priest, but he quickly passed her on to the big gun, Monsignor Fulton Sheen, understanding full well that Clare Luce would need a priest—as she herself later said—“who had seen the rise and fall of empires.”

However pious she could appear, there were strill flashes of the old Clare. When she addressed the Republican National Convention of 1948, Dorothy Kilgallen wrote of her, “Clare was a sight to see as she stood on tiptoe in her black suede flatties and railed against the ‘troubadors of trouble’ and ‘the crooners of catastrophe.’ ” She called the former vice president Henry Wallace “Stalin’s Mortimer Snerd” and Wallace’s notions “globaloney.” But, like Harry, she was terrified of Communists and believed as fervently as he did in the notion of the American Century, the anthem and the flag, Manifest Destiny, Significant Ideas.

Clare had always thought in terms of absolute good and evil, and perhaps the church, with its belief in divine absolution, saved her life. Later she would write in McCall’s that she had become Catholic “in order to rid myself of my burden of sin.” She became convinced that she would meet Ann in the beauty of the afterlife, but, however religious she became, the loss of Ann remained a persistent and tragic wound. In her last years, as she was moving from her retreat in Hawaii back to Washington, her friend Cobey Black discovered her in a studio on the grounds of her Kahala estate sobbing uncontrollably. “Never move at this stage in your life, Cobey,” she told her. “Throwing away a lifetime of possessions will cause you such pain it will undo you.” Nearby, in a trash can, was a small pair of Dutch wooden shoes a servant had thoughtlessly discarded. On the back, in a small, childish hand, was the message “To Mommy, I love you so much, Ann.”

But the real loneliness was yet to come. In the 1950s Harry was still alive, chasing Communists and reigning over his empire, and Clare’s becoming a devout Catholic had the additional and unexpected benefit of releasing her from feeling sexually rejected by him. She now had a psychological loophole to save her female vanity as Harry sought the comforts of other women—a fact which was known to their intimates. Clare had been, after all, a divorced woman when she married Harry, and the church did not recognize her second marriage. If she slept with Harry Luce, as a Catholic convert, she would be committing a mortal sin. And so, she confided to friends, once she became Catholic she and Harry lived together as “brother and sister.” Ironically, with the sexual pressure lifted, the Luce marriage went into high gear. They became terrific allies, Man and Superman, stronger together than they had ever been in the past. Clare was soon back in action, campaigning for Eisenhower, who repaid the compliment by naming her the first woman ambassador to a major country, in this case Italy. “I won’t go without Harry,” she told him, and Harry agreed to being in Rome with her six months a year. Harry soon grew used to his wife affecting a huge cross with every outfit she wore, and he tolerated all the priests who now surrounded her. But neither Clare nor Harry could ever go back to Mepkin with a clear heart, and soon after her conversion Clare turned her beloved plantation over to a community of Trappist monks, who to this day happily give visitors a tour of the Luce azalea beds.

She created an image and she stuck with it, surviving a long life with the same desires which had driven her as a child: she wanted to be taken seriously and she wanted to be a factor in society, even after Harry had retired from Time and the Luces had retreated to Phoenix. A marvelous picture of Clare Luce was taken a few years ago. Her face is serene, sheathed with the tiniest lines, and in one hand is a rose of such perfection Redouté might have created it. A print shawl is wrapped around her shoulders. “That is how Clare should have been as an old lady and never was,” her friend Marvin Liebman said.

Harry Luce surprised everyone who knew him in that he actually retired from Time when he turned the magazine over to his successor, Hedley Donovan, in 1964. Clare was less able to slow down and move into another phase of her life. She continued to call Richard Clurman, who was then one of the top editors of Time, to suggest story ideas. “Clare used to be fascinated by U.F.O.’s, and wanted all kinds of antivivisection stories assigned,” he said. It was impossible for her to sit still. In retirement, Clare campaigned for Barry Goldwater, wrote articles for National Review, and followed the minutiae of politics to such a degree that she could recite the voting records of key Republican senators and congressmen. At night, while Harry read, she would sit with him, surrounded by boxes of glue, Styrofoam, velvet, sequins, and ribbons, making Christmas ornaments of such professionalism that she sold them at Henri Bendel and donated the money to charity. But in Arizona, surrounded by retirees and shopping malls, Clare began to sag in spirit. She lost interest in her looks, stopped wearing makeup and cut her hair in a Buster Brown style. She told friends that the worst thing about getting old was that men “no longer want you.” “Oh, Harry, you are married to an old, old woman,” she once said to her husband, according to Shirley Clurman. “Yes,” Luce replied, “but I am married to a beautiful old woman.”

Clare continued to grow depressed in the desert and longed for the sea. She had fallen in love with Hawaii in 1938, when she had vacationed there with Harry and Ann. She had published her experiences in Vogue, with photos of her with her surfing instructor, Captain Hale, and of Ann “surf-riding” at Waikiki. “Here’s another secret about Hawaii,” she wrote breathlessly, “how you’ll miss it, miss it all, when three thousand miles of the calm Pacific is between it and you! Hawaii, someone once said, is a state of mind.”

Harry and Clare made elaborate plans to build a Kahala retreat on the beach on fashionable Diamond Head Road, and once again they chose Edward Durell Stone as their designer. It would be the most expensive house ever constructed in Hawaii up to that time, with a dining room that could accommodate thirty, separate studies for Harry and Clare, and several studios on the grounds for servants and guests—all facing the ocean. They no doubt imagined that a stream of journalists and politicians would make this place a necessary stop on the way to the Far East. Additionally, Harry would be much closer to his beloved China. “This was to be their last house,” a friend said, and they were making plans to entertain the local bankers and mayors. “They were so happy,” Cobey Black said. “It was to be a new life.”

But it was not to be. In Phoenix, a few months before they were to move, Harry Luce began to cough violently. He was hospitalized, but he seemed fine, reading his Bible and watching Perry Mason on TV. That night he woke up and screamed, “Oh, Jesus!” Nurses came running, but Luce had died instantly of a coronary occlusion. He died so unexpectedly that he had left no burial instructions with either his son, Hank, or Clare, but Hank remembered that he had once mentioned he would like to be buried at Mepkin next to his adored stepdaughter, Ann. A simple stone marked the site in a grove of live oaks, and the monks carved Clare’s name on it too. After the funeral, the Trappists approached Mrs. Luce. “We have some marble left over that we are planning to use for your tomb,” they told her. “Would you like to see it?” “God, no!” she said.

Curiously, for all their closeness, Harry Luce left Clare “the absolute minimum he could get away with without having the will challenged,” according to a close associate. Clare would receive the interest from a trust he set up for her—and nothing else. Upon Clare’s death, the trust would revert to the Henry Luce Foundation, which was to be administered not by Clare but by Hank. And so, at age sixty-four, Clare Boothe Luce could not properly enjoy the spoils of power, as Brooke Astor, for example, was able to when her husband Vincent willed her control of the Vincent Astor Foundation, which gave her the fun of being not only a Great Lady but also a philanthropist to be courted and admired. Clare became a widow on a fixed income, admittedly an extremely high fixed income. “Why wouldn’t Harry Luce have given his wife that power?” I asked a close friend of hers. “In the end, maybe Harry didn’t like Clare that much,” the friend said. But perhaps the explanation was more complicated: in death, Harry Luce was finally able to score one on Clare. She might be a better shot, a wittier host, a more sought-after speaker, the one chosen as ambassador, but he was after all the boss, and he knew that his son would carry on his tradition in a manner more to his liking.

Even worse, Clare began to lose her legendary ability to enchant the powerful. After Harry’s death, she was once invited to the Laurance Rockefellers’ for dinner. She wanted desperately to be embraced by the Rockefeller world, a friend said, but it didn’t happen. She reportedly carried on all through the evening about politics and money, but her trenchant brittleness just seemed meanspirited, not precocious and clever as it had when she was a fragile young glamour girl. A part of the New York social world closed to her forever. “You were only friends with Clare on her terms,” an acquaintance said.

Clare instructed Edward Durell Stone to redesign her Hawaiian house as a one-person palace. “I don’t want a lot of guests,” she said. Friends moved in to supervise the construction. “You better make sure I can see the sunset from my lanai when I’m drinking my evening martini,” William Buckley said she told them. Clare’s house was “eccentric and nutty,” a friend said, with the same immense dining room and entertaining areas that she and Harry had wanted, but now it had only one small guest bedroom. Clare’s own bedroom was huge, a vast pastel retreat with a study attached, leading out to private beach paths. Her bathroom had a separate beauty-parlor sink for her hairdresser’s daily visit, and six servants changed the dozens of arrangements of tropical flowers each day. Macaws and parakeets flew through the house. Additionally, Clare had three room-size closets, where her dresses hung on rotating electric racks of the sort usually found in dry cleaners’. One entire closet was used to store Louis Vuitton trunks that dated from her days as Mrs. Brokaw. “Clare was a pack rat. She never threw anything away,” a friend said. Even Clare’s living room had a glass-case coffee table with every medal she had ever won displayed inside.

She flourished in Hawaii, swam every day and started wearing makeup again. She ran her Hawaiian household with a discipline that was often daunting to guests. “We would be told that drinks were served on the lanai at 6:30 P.M. sharp and dinner was to be at 7 P.M., because Clare did not want to discommode the servants,” the writer Miriam Ungerer said. In the guest room, there was a row of buttons on the telephone that one could use to call for a laundress, a snack, or even a sleeping pill. Clothes left in a heap on a chair would be returned within an hour, beautifully pressed, with hems magically repaired. Such was Clare’s tyranny that women lunch guests quickly divined that they would be served iced tea while the men received a carafe of white wine. “There was something about Clare that prevented you from ever dreaming of asking if you could have a glass of wine,” Miriam Ungerer said.

But Clare was hardly idle in Honolulu. For a long while she served on political committees such as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to which Richard Nixon had appointed her. She prided herself on her role as the grand old lady of the Republican Party; the Washington Post was hurled onto her lawn as soon as it hit Honolulu. Her telephone would ring constantly from Washington—politicians seeking advice and favors. Clare would answer the phone as if she were the housekeeper in order to screen calls: “Hello. Mrs. Luce’s residence. Who is calling Mrs. Luce?” Once, she was on the telephone with Edward Kennedy when her neighbor Allan Carr was over. “When Clare hung up, she came onto the lanai and said, ‘Teddy is a nice boy, but he has so much to learn.’ ” Often she would fly to Washington or New York for meetings and dinners, and when Reagan was elected president she made plans to leave Hawaii behind her and sail into Washington for her final years. “She felt like she was going back in triumph, as if she were playing the final scene from Hello, Dolly!” Allan Carr said.

Washington, however, would prove a letdown as Clare began to realize that her luster had dimmed. Unlike the distinguished statesman Averell Harriman, whose immense accomplishments and prestige were constantly propped up by his tireless wife, Pamela, Clare had no one in Washington to champion her in old age. She remained an indifferent hostess, and her apartment at the Watergate was spacious but not grand. The special treatment which she had had in Hawaii as a novelty act and the grand reception which had always been accorded her when Luce was alive seemed more difficult to come by in a city which cared more for current leverage than history. Her friends appeared to have entered into a tacit conspiracy to allow Clare the illusion that she was still the young and vibrant dynamo. Inevitably, she would say she was working on a new article, or concept, or speech, and she hired public-relations consultants to introduce her to the “right” people in town. She still cared so much. A new group came into her life, particularly Edwin J. Feulner, the head of the conservative Heritage Foundation, but also columnists, lobbyists, and young White House speech writers. Her loyal friend William Buckley was a great help to her in Washington, reminding the Reagans of her presence, for example, and Mrs. Luce was thrilled when, two months before her eightieth birthday, President Reagan awarded her the Medal of Freedom at an honorary luncheon.

But her last years were not happy; the effort required to keep up the image was too great, and Clare had grown old and tired of camouflage, of pulling on the girdle every night for another meaningless event. Each time she went out to a party, she would take three flowers from her hostess’s table as she was leaving. “One is for Harry, one is for Ann, and one is for my mother,” she would say. Always searching for family, Clare grew especially close to Hank Luce’s second wife, Nancy, whom she had known since Nancy was a schoolgirl in Charleston. Clare always said Nancy reminded her of Ann. Although Clare and Hank had had a distant and cold relationship when Hank was young, after Henry Luce died, Clare went to him and apologized for years of imperious neglect. “The reason I have been cold to you all these years is because I never wanted to compete with your mother for your affections,” she told him—a bit of flattery he was gracious enough to believe. In fact, Clare needed Hank Luce, and she adored his wife. She was devastated to learn, in 1986, that Nancy, who was fifty-six, had incurable cancer. And so Clare Luce in the last years of her life was paradoxically at her most maternal, traveling to New York almost every weekend to take care of her stepson’s wife. Perhaps she reasoned that she would be able to do for Nancy what she had never been able to do for her Ann. Sometimes she would arrive at the shuttle in a wheelchair, telling the friends who accompanied her, “This was what I always dreaded, to be a helpless little old lady.”

Once, in New York, she was strong enough to take a long walk down Madison Avenue and over to her old neighborhood near Beekman Place. She strolled back and walked into Bergdorf Goodman to look for a fine dress, but was horrified to see that a new Geoffrey Beene evening dress now cost $3,000. Despite her huge income, she was appalled by this excess, and, like so many old people reared in poverty who become rich, she was consumed with money worries, as if she were still the destitute Clare Booth eating penny rolls in the boardinghouse. That night she seemed overwhelmingly sad. “This is not my town anymore,” she said. “I feel lost here.”

After Nancy Luce died, Clare slipped into another profound depression, as if she were reliving Ann’s death. Last year she began demonstrating funny symptoms, such as forgetting names and losing her speech. At first her doctors believed she was suffering from “hysterical depression,” a theory supported by most of her remaining friends. Like Harry Luce before her, Clare had driven away many of those. friends with the potential to truly love her.

“I want to give a farewell party,” Clare suddenly told her friends last summer. She was eighty-four years old, and she had learned that her problem was not psychological. She had a brain tumor. Instead of becoming gloomy, she became extraordinarily cheerful, even smiling when the doctor explained the severity of her condition. “She knew she was at the realization of a conclusion,” the Trappist abbot of Mepkin told me. Once, when a friend came to visit her, Mrs. Luce pulled up her bedsheet: “Look at those legs. They used to be so gorgeous!” At the memorial service for Grace Kelly in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she said to William Buckley, “That is how I would like to go out.” Even at the end, she was a drama queen, a woman of theater, planning her good-bye party at the Watergate. Shirley Clurman counseled her to do it “properly,” with plenty of staff and good food, but Clare had her own ideas. “I want it very simple,” she said, “home-style, with lots of children, and bowls of spaghetti on each table, and maybe Dove Bars for dessert.” Thirty guests were invited, and Clare sat on a low stool for part of the evening so that her guests had to bend down to talk to her. “Good-bye,” she would say weakly, as if she knew that this was the last time she would ever see them.

One month later the abbot of Mepkin drove up through the Blue Ridge Mountains to Washington to see Clare. Although he had not been invited, he knew it was time. Father Christian and Clare had been together on dozens of occasions through the years, as recently as the previous June, when Clare had showed him photographs of Ann in the glory days of Mepkin, on a swing in a grove of Spanish-oak trees, a young girl filled with promise and joy, smiling as the wind caught her hair. “Isn’t she a lovely girl?” Clare had said, reverting to the present tense. And now it was autumn and Father Christian had felt compelled to come to Washington again. “When I arrived, I introduced as tactfully as I could the sacrament of reconciliation and the last rites.” From her bed, “in a beautiful clear voice,” she said to him, “I want everything.” And so the abbot of Mepkin spoke with her of the beatific vision, the celebration of eternal life, in which she would once again be united with Ann. As the abbot left Mrs. Luce’s bedroom, she said to her housekeeper, “I am so happy now. To think that the father came all the way from South Carolina.” Three weeks later, Clare Boothe Luce was dead.

Her funeral at Mepkin was private. A sign went up in front of her former plantation: NO VISITORS. Only about thirty people traveled to South Carolina to mourn the woman of the century. She was buried in the shadow of an immense white-granite cross, in the small grove where she had walked so many times, staring at her daughter’s headstone or off into the distance at the Cooper River, where Irish immigrants had once toiled building a dike for twenty-five cents a day. The Trappists performed the ceremony with their characteristic austerity: no organ, just a simple guitar. Mrs. Luce was laid out not in a bronze coffin but in a varnished pine box.

Clare’s money from Harry reverted to the Luce Foundation, but Hank Luce was thoughtful enough to allow her to make bequests of her choosing. Her list was, William Buckley said, “eccentric and rather charming, perhaps Clare’s way of saying ‘Up yours!’ ” The girl who had never gone to college left fellowships to all the colleges and universities that had honored her with degrees. She left $500,000 to the archconservative Heritage Foundation, presided over by her friend Ed Feulner, but not a cent to Buckley’s National Review, although she had mentioned that she wanted to leave a grant for summer internships for worthy young journalists.

The week after Clare Luce’s death, a memorial service was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but that celebration too seemed curiously anticlimactic. In New York, where celebrity funerals are often great social events, Clare Boothe Luce’s service was crowded but hardly stellar, as if there were a subliminal recognition in the upper reaches that she had outlived her time. Fifth Avenue was not cordoned off to hold back the curious, as it had been for Averell Harriman’s funeral, and neither President Reagan nor Vice President Bush chose to attend. The noontime service on that crisp October day was filled with heavenly-rest seekers who seemed astonished to have wandered into an ordinary mass conducted by Cardinal O’Connor with William Buckley as eulogist and Richard Nixon and Jerome Zip-kin among the mourners. The altar was not banked with Clare’s favorite peach-colored roses, and there were no children to mourn her passing and to carry on. “Clare would have been mortified by this service,” Marvin Liebman said as he walked out of the cathedral into the brilliance of the clear autumn day. “But perhaps her life was a cautionary tale.” Even as he spoke, a few paparazzi who had gathered on East Fiftieth Street were scanning the crowd for notables, but their cameras remained mostly at their sides.